Concrete Art
Started: 1930
Ended: 1959
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KEY ARTISTS
 | Theo van Doesburg Quick View Artist Page |
| Theo van Doesburg |  |
| Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, who together with Piet Mondrian established the De Stijl movement. Van Doesburg's most famous work experimented with geometric abstraction and archetypal forms. He was also a prominent architect and writer. Art Story: Theo van Doesburg Artist Page | ||
 | Piet Mondrian Quick View Artist Page |
| Piet Mondrian | |
| Piet Mondrian, a founding member of the De Stijl movement, was a modern Dutch artist who used grids, perpendicular lines, and the three primary colors in what he deemed Neo-plasticism. Art Story: Piet Mondrian Artist Page | ||
 | Max Bill Quick View Further External Info  |
| Max Bill | |
| Max Bill was a Swiss architect, artist, typeface designer, industrial designer, and graphic designer. After an apprenticeship as a silversmith, Bill took up studies at the Bauhaus under many teachers including Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee from 1927 to 1929. He went on to become an influencial educator and artist. Further External Info | ||
 | Lygia Clark Quick View Artist Page |
| Lygia Clark | |
| Lygia Clark developed participatory art, explored organic and corporeal sculptural forms, and innovated therapeutic art practice. Art Story: Lygia Clark Artist Page | ||
"A pictorial element has no other meaning than 'itself' and thus the picture has no other meaning than 'itself'."
Summary of Concrete Art
Concrete Artists, following in the footsteps of movements such as Constructivism and De Stijl, offered an art entirely divorced from realistic subject-matter, based around precise and preemptive compositional structures, many of which represented mathematical or scientific formulas. In practical terms, Concrete Art was a movement of the mid-twentieth century: though it was given impetus by a manifesto penned by Theo van Doesburg in 1930, the term was popularized over the following two decades by the Swiss artist and designer Max Bill. By the 1950s, Concrete Art had grown into an internationally prevalent and immediately recognizable style, spreading outwards from its initial bases in France and Switzerland to find fertile ground all over Europe and, most significantly, in Latin America. The emergence of Neo-Concretism in Brazil in 1959 arguably signalled the demise of Concrete Art, but movements across a range of media, including Kinetic Art, Hard-Edged Painting, and Concrete Poetry, continued to bear the trace of its influence.
Key Ideas
Beginnings:
Concrete Art can trace its origins back to the early-twentieth-century movement of Constructivism, which in turn cannot be discussed in isolation from the invigorating effects of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Since the late 1900s, Russian artists such as the Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, and various individuals attached to movements such as Rayonism, Neo-Primitivism, and Cubo-Futurism, had been undertaking exercises in breaking down the picture plane and redefining sculptural form. This aim was shared with other movements across Europe, such as Cubism, but in the febrile political atmosphere of Russia in the mid-1910s it was increasingly pegged to a revolutionary political agenda. Non-figurative representation was seized on as a metaphor for the revolutions in thought and perception that the Revolution would usher in.
Important Art and Artists of Concrete Art | |
  | Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930)Artist: Piet Mondrian Artwork description & Analysis: Though this painting was not conceived as a work of Concrete Art, Mondrian's vision of a universal compositional language rooted in a minimum of elements - horizontal and vertical black lines framing squares of white, red, yellow, and blue - summed up the spirit of Concretism avant-la-lettre. Moreover, the earliest works of Concrete Art were imbued with the spirit of Neo-Plasticism, and took their impetus from a manifesto penned by Mondrian's sometime compatriot Theo van Doesburg in 1930. In 1960, Max Bill mounted the exhibition Konkrete Kunst in Zurich in order to celebrate 50 years of Concrete Art's development, suggesting that the movement's primary polemicist was happy to incorporate early twentieth-century artists into its heritage. Oil and paper on canvas - National Museum, Belgrade, Serbia |
 Artwork Images | Variation 14 (1938)Artist: Max Bill Artwork description & Analysis: In 1934, Max Bill, then in the early stages of defining the Concrete Art movement, began a series of artworks based on a simple geometrical exercise. He created an unfinished equilateral triangle whose third side would protrude out at a different angle to create a square, whose fourth side would protrude out at a different angle to create a pentagon, and so on (potentially ad infinitum, though Bill's formula stopped at the octagon). This simple mathematical principle was used as the basis for a series of lithographs which expressed the concept in a number of different ways: for example, by creating circles connecting up the shape's implied corners. In 1938 he published the series, asserting in his introduction to the Variations that "concrete art holds an infinite number of possibilities", even though "[s]uch constructions are developed only on the basis of their given conditions and without any arbitrary attempt to modify them." 15 lithographs - Daimler-Chrysler Collection, Berlin |
 | Endless Ribbon (c. 1953-56)Artist: Max Bill Artwork description & Analysis: Max Bill was a sculptor, architect, and industrial designer as well as a painter. Indeed, his creative career, like that of his Argentine peer Tomás Maldonado, marked a gradual movement away from the canvas towards evermore large-scale and functional realisations of his principles. An early staging post on this journey was the creation in 1935 of his first Endless Ribbon sculpture, a later recreation of which is shown here. Based on the principle of the Möbius strip - a ribbon whose two surfaces run into each other - the series would occupy Bill continuously until his death in 1994, incorporating works in paper, metal, and stone. Bronze - Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum, Antwerp, Belgium |
More Concrete Art Artwork and Analysis:
Content compiled and written by Greg Thomas
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Movement Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Greg Thomas
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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First published on 25 Mar 2019. Updated and modified regularly. 
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